Collection: David Friesen

David Friesen grew up in Tacoma, became a professional musician at sixteen without yet knowing how to play bass, learned the instrument at nineteen during army service in Germany, and settled in Portland in the early 1970s, where he opened a coffeehouse and started working regularly with Joe Henderson, Stan Getz, Sam Rivers and Dexter Gordon when they passed through. That's an unusual career path even by jazz standards, and the music Friesen made from it was equally hard to categorise: acoustic, textural, rooted in the Pacific Northwest in the same way Oregon were rooted there, meaning it drew from classical chamber music, folk and world music as readily as from post-bop without feeling divided between them. His debut "Color Pool" (Muse, 1975) established that sensibility immediately, featuring bamboo flute, double-tracked bass parts and meditative passages on an album that sounded unlike anything being made in New York at the same time. The run of Inner City albums that followed, particularly "Star Dance" (1976) and "Waterfall Rainbow" (1977), both recorded with guitarist John Stowell and Oregon reed player Paul McCandless, brought him wider attention. "Waterfall Rainbow" added Ralph Towner on classical and twelve-string guitar alongside drummer Bob Moses, pulling the record into the same orbit as the early ECM catalogues without directly imitating them. He won Most Valuable Musician at the 1977 Monterey Jazz Festival. Later work with Hozan Yamamoto and Masahiko Sato took him to Japan, and a long collaboration with pianist Mal Waldron extended his reach into European jazz circles. He is still active and based in Portland, aged 83.